CEU History Department Yearbook 1993 by Andrea PetőReview by: Martyn RadyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Apr., 1996), pp. 314-315Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212084 .

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314 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

University Press's generosity with facilities for the numerous maps and charts will make many academics envious.

School of Histoiy J. T. LUKOWSKI University of Birmingham

Pet6, Andrea (ed.). CEU Histogy Department Yearbook i993. Central European University Press, Budapest, 1994. 293 pp. Notes. Tables. Appendix. No price available.

THE History Department of the Central European University was established in I99I. In its first year the Department ran a teacher-training scheme; thereafter a Master's programme validated by the University of Budapest. The I993 Yearbook, the first to be published by the Department, gives a brief history of the Department's activities and aims: 'the reconciliation of intellectuals in East-Central Europe [... ] mutual understanding [... ] to develop a fruitful combination of the best European traditions with American initiative and efficiency' (p. 9). The vast bulk of the volume (pp. 23-273) is given over, however, to essays by full- and part-time members of the Department, and by visiting professors and lecturers. Only one of the fifteen contributions is the work of a postgraduate student.

The essays included in the volume have little in common except that they all deal with aspects of the history of Central Europe from the sixteenth century to the late twentieth century. Their quality is equally diverse. Istvian Gyorgy T6th provides a skilful analysis of literacy among the eighteenth- century Hungarian nobility relying in the main on the records of judicial investigations into the loss of patents of nobility. With regard to the conditions of female employment in Hungary in the 1950s, Andrea Pet6 instructively contrasts the official propaganda to recently discovered internal party reports. Norman Stone provides a sympathetic portrait ofA. J. P. Taylor. Stone's account includes some scarcely-concealed barbs aimed at the faddishness and preoccupation with methodology which is characteristic of much East European historiography today. Other contributions are less satisfactory. Peer Hanak continues to wrestle with the responsibility of the I 867 Settlement for the dissolution of I9I8: a problem largely of his own manufacture. Eva Balazs, in an otherwise imaginative comparison between the history of port and Tokay wines, blames Austrian economic policy for the commercial failure of the latter. Only in a footnote are we told of the problems of transportation and of other specifically Hungarian difficulties (p. 45). Susan Zimmermann, commenting on the Budapest city ordinance of I9IO which made fathers financially responsible for their illegitimate offspring, idly remarks that 'This was prompted less by the prospect of any immediate financial advantage to the state or municipality, than by the policy of bringing women to a better perception of their reproductive duties' (p. I 72). David Good simply repeats the preface to a multi-author volume under his editorship. Milada Poli'senska's account of George Kennan's activities in Prague after Munich is blighted by an editorial failure to distinguish between her own observations and those of her subject. The editing generally of the work is uneven. Alexey Miller's essay

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REVIEWS 315

on Galicia after the Ausgleich is mostly composed without the help of definite and indefinite articles. In a few places editorial supervision seems to have involved no more than turning on the Spellcheck: thus Roman Empire appears on page 37 as 'Human Empire'; elsewhere (p. I55) Eva Haraszti is made the late A. J. P. Taylor's 'window'. To achieve the standards of 'American initiative and efficiency', more attention will have to be paid in future by the publishers of the Yearbook to what George Soros might call product-definition and hands-on editorial management.

School of Slavonic and East European Studies MARTYN RADY

University of London

Gross, Mirjana. Die Anfdnge des modernen Kroatien. Gesellschaft, Politik und Kultur in Zivil-Kroatien und -Slawonien in den ersten dreissig Jahren nach 1848. Anton Gindely Reihe zur Geschichte der Donaumonarchie und Mittel- europas, i. Bohlau, Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, 1993. 311 PP. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. oS 476.oo: DM 68.oo.

THIs book summarizes for an international audience two extensive works by the leading historian of late Habsburg Croatia (M. Gross, Poceci moderne Hrvatske. JNeoapsolutizam u civilnoj'Hrvatskoj i Slavonji i85o-i86o [Zagreb, I985], and M. Gross and A. Szabo, Prema hrvatskomegradjanskom dru?tvu. Druvtveni razvoj u civilnoj Hrvatskoj i Slavon#ji sezdesetih i sedamdesetih godina ig. stolje&a [Zagreb, 1992]). A lengthy bibliographical essay takes the place of notes; while the rich factual detail of the original is largely omitted, issues bearing on recent events, such as the evolution of the Yugoslav idea and Serb-Croat relations, are deliberately treated somewhat more fully. The text reflects the gift for lucid presentation of complex issues which has made Professor Mirjana Gross the best-known historian from former Yugoslavia in both the German and the English speaking worlds.

Her theme is the constraints on modernization in civil Croatia-Slavonia (that is, excluding Dalmatia, Istria and the Military Frontier) imposed by economic and cultural backwardness, demographic stagnation and an unfa- vourable political climate. A harsh picture emerges of the neo-absolutist i 85os, whose reforms appear directed at maximum extraction from a peripheral province at minimum cost; an efficient bureaucracy was not in fact established which could cope with spiralling disputes between peasants and their ex-lords arising from emancipation, or with the plight of the zadrugajoint family system under free market norms. The Hungarian hegemony established by the Nagodba of i868 subordinated Croatian economic interests to its own, as in railway development, and ultimately broke Ban Mazuranic's attempt to inch Croatia's restricted autonomy towards a modernizing parliamentarism. The Yugoslav ideology which flourished in this period is explained in 'functional' terms as a means to transcend these difficult circumstances by broadening the base of a potentially modern national culture; contemporary opinion pointed in this direction because of the identification of language and nationhood and the belief that the latter required its soul, which in view of German-Magyar pressures was seen in Slav terms. While for Strossmayer

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